Tesla's Model X was her current first choice. She had read its range was a theoretical 400 kilometres for the most expensive model. She'd begun to believe. The thought of a new car appealed. She made a mental note to investigate. The real question was: how long would it take to deliver in Spain when Tesla manufactured in California?
She pressed the code into the keypad by the front door. Inside she found its interior spotless, aired and ready. Forewarned, her housekeeper, Almudena who lived in a village nearby, had burnished the place as if it was her own. She'd left food in the fridge, fruit in a bowl on the kitchen counter and a stack of cut wood for the big stove.
Inma climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She adored this room, with its expansive windows overlooking the plains below. Three times, she'd compelled the designer to refine his ideas – until his design had become her own.
Her travel case placed on its stand in her dressing room, she released the bolts of one of the French windows and stepped out onto a narrow balcony. She sat on the stone bench built into the wall and sucked in the fresh mountain air as the setting sun's shadows extended.
Only when the sun had dropped behind Portugal did she head downstairs to light the wood-burning stove. With dry olive and apple wood, it soon took. Heat suffused the ground floor within twenty minutes.
This accomplished she kicked herself. She could, she should, when upstairs have used her time to enter her secret chapel, a place she hadn't visited in well over a year, though it was where she'd once spent an hour twice, sometimes three times, a day.
This chapel was the indirect cause of why she'd taken a break from her expanding business. Her aim was the reconciliation of her many internal conflicts. Whether this was achievable was unclear. The distress she'd hitherto been able to dismiss now refused to dissipate on demand. With a disheartening subtlety, it robbed her of sleep and multiplied her anxiety levels. These undermined her confidence.
Piraeus (Greece)
The hydrofoil eased across the Piraeus inner harbour basin before approaching the designated berth. A crewman hopped ashore once the mooring lines were in place to run a metal gangplank from the quayside onto the hydrofoil's forward starboard wing. A few passengers filed off in desultory fashion and dispersed into assorted taxis, private cars and mini-buses.
Ten minutes later, the motley collection of those remaining on the quayside filed on board to seek their allotted seats in what resembled a sunken metal cave. Davide experienced relief as the crew cast off. The seat next to him was empty. This would provide a little extra room at least as far as the first stop, Poros.
He gazed out through the none-too-clean windows as the hydrofoil chugged its way past several massive cruise liners before exiting the port's outer entrance and accelerating up onto its skis. For a little over an hour he would skim across the outer Saronic Gulf, from north to south, before slowing to ease through the narrow strait to tie up for a bare five minutes in the Poros public harbour. From there it would be another half hour to his destination: Ydra, an island he liked yet regarded as a luxurious prison.
Months back, much more than a year if he counted the total elapsed time, he'd accepted an assignment to explore the implications of bitcoins, and particularly the underpinning technology known as the 'blockchain' or 'hyperledger'. When he began he'd thought he'd understood the fundamentals. It soon emerged he didn't, at least not enough to satisfy his clients. They didn't either, which was why they'd retained him.
He'd then performed some serious brushing up before digging into the entrails his clients wished him to examine. He was fortunate. His clients wanted quality. They said they would wait if they received depth as his deliverable.
To start with, they'd based him in Athens. This was an unusual choice. They justified his isolation on the need for confidentiality. No one would expect him there. As a condition of his assignment, he could tell no one his location.
This brought several difficulties and Davide soon came to hate crisis-dominated Athens with so many unhappy and vengeful people all trying to steal a march on Northern Europeans and especially each other. To his surprise, a third of the Greek population lived in the greater Athens area. The city included those who possessed everything, those with nothing and every extreme between.
The daily contrast was bitter. He himself had encountered the contradictions. He'd had his passport and wallet purloined from what he thought was a safe front trouser pocket while waiting for a bus. His good fortune was he'd felt movement and spun around in time to see the culprit and retrieve both. He should have called the police. Why hadn't he? He'd learnt from neighbours there was no point. Petty thievery was commonplace. No one expected action from a cowed, under-resourced police force.
Sick of Athens, he'd remonstrated about his working conditions. His hope was his clients would agree he move to London or Berlin or the US: each was logical in the context of what he researched
They had responded with the offer of a house on the island of Ydra – "only ninety minutes from Athens by fast ferry". As anything had seemed better than Athens, he'd accepted to find himself installed in a handsome Captain's House with dramatic vistas overlooking the Peloponnese. It was located high on hills above what turned out to be a luxury Greek island whose one significant village consisted of traditional white walled buildings surrounding its port.
In one sense, it was bliss. The house was large and comfortable, built by a retired nineteenth-century master mariner to accommodate his extended family. Modernised, it included a pair of terraces, one shaded by a mature olive tree and the other open to the elements with a minuscule swimming puddle – to describe it as a pool would be way too admiring. Both possessed views down over the port and across the strait dividing Ydra from the mainland.
Inside, he enjoyed good Internet connections, a necessity for his work, and a choice of rooms. At night there was a cosy interior room, off the kitchen, with its big open fireplace and lots of wood. In the morning, he woke to views towards the south-west where the sun bounced off Ermioni with the mountains of ancient Sparta behind.
The house's principle downside was one he hadn't imagined: too many steps. There were 555, by his count, from his front door down to the port. Every time he went to buy meat or fish or vegetables, he had to descend those 555 with the same 555 back up. Carrying anything heavy was arduous. His knees felt the strain.
The only alternative, for the island authorised only a handful of service vehicles for rubbish collection and firefighting, was to hire a donkey. At thirty euros per load, donkeys were expensive, each costing far more than a taxi for each kilometre travelled. He had quailed at this on arrival. When his clients did not object to his charging donkeys on expenses, a novelty, he used them most weeks.
Yet, as he watched a rented donkey set off with his water, wine and food, he still had his own 555 steps to climb. He could never bring himself to sit on a donkey. It looked too frightening.
He refocused to replay that day's meeting. It was, he hoped, his last on this project. What should he do next? He turned over various possibilities.
Muro de Alcoi (Spain)
Ana ducked aside as a parade of delivery men carried in the last consignment of carton after carton of books. She remained stunned by the quantity, despite the warnings from her architect. He'd advised she needed at least 150 linear metres of shelving. Nine thousand books required space if she wanted to enjoy their presence. One day, she'd owned at most a hundred books. A week later she possessed a library.
The first consequence mandated a major alteration to the house, on the side facing towards the nearest edge of her best Blanqueta olive groves. She'd insisted the architect combine the two largest ground floor rooms into one. Then she'd lined all four sides, including between the broad windows, with shelves. She'd left space for extra shelf-stubs to stick out a couple of metres from the side walls if she found she needed more space. With this in train, she'd sought a book specialist.
The good news, if that was the right word, was
the introduction by Señor Delafuente, her abogado or lawyer, to Alfonso, a retired professional librarian. He'd agreed to stay in her house for up to three months to catalogue and organise. The initial downside was the obligation to eat with Alfonso every evening. While this was due courtesy, she'd started out fearing he would intrude into her new-found calm.
Alfonso had more than repaid her courtesy. Not only had she learned about books, but he'd identified a dozen which, he estimated, might attract book collector bids of many thousands of euros. If she sold... As he delivered this agreeable insight, he'd warned her that to keep them she must insure and secure them, or they would disappear.
A second benefit of his company emerged early on, when he presented two obscure nineteenth-century tomes, in poor condition, about olive growing. These, despite the antique Spanish, she'd devoured to Alfonso's astonishment and manifest delight.
This mutual success forged a bond. Now he treated her more as a granddaughter than his employer. She reciprocated.
To confuse matters further, on impulse, she'd invited Señor Delafuente to stay. One evening she'd unearthed how he and Alfonso knew each other. They'd met at university, albeit more years ago than she'd been alive. That alone was cause for thought, as was the practical difficulty of having anyone extra in this outdated estate house.
While the exterior was in decent shape, the roof watertight, the walls strong and most other fundamentals sound, the interior, excepting her new library-cum-salon with its refashioned garden terrace outside, was prehistoric. The plumbing, the electrics, the bathrooms, the kitchen and the heating – all were ancient and capricious.
For herself, she didn't mind too much, though she missed a modern piping hot shower. Instead she had an antediluvian bathroom with a choice of superannuated bath or leaky and elderly shower with little more than a weak dribble of warm, but never hot, water. To complicate life, no two people could bathe at the same time. The pressure wasn't up to it. Señor Delafuente and Alfonso would share the only other quarter-decent bathroom. Too bad if they objected.
She knew she should head for the kitchen. Her habitual reluctance intervened. Visiting involved expeditions down long dim corridors to the rear of the house. Antique was too generous. Only the magic of Adriá, its previous cook, made it tolerable. Adriá, somehow, coaxed fantastic meals from its desperate facilities. How, Ana didn't know. And she didn't want to know.
At last the final book delivery was complete. All were inside, in two dedicated rooms where she'd installed a small desk for Alfonso with a laptop on which to create the catalogue and his valuation. Each day he drew out volumes from their shipping cartons to enter details into his database. Then he would clean each before placing it on his trolley. Once a day, sometimes twice, he would wheel this into the library to position each volume in its new home.
On his first day at dinner he'd alarmed Ana. He'd enquired which classification scheme she preferred. It was a question she'd never before faced.
At her puzzlement, he'd suggested either the Dewey Decimal System or a simplified Library of Congress Classification System. She'd responded by asking which he preferred, and why. That answer alone had consumed dinner.
By common consent they chose Dewey. It was universal, straightforward and appropriate for her collection size. As part of his unveiling process Alfonso pencilled a number inside each book as he proceeded. He'd recommended she decide later whether to mark every volume on the exterior. In ignorance she'd acquiesced. She was little the wiser now, though he was diligent in emailing her a daily digest with the latest version of the catalogue.
From early on their dinners became an opportunity for him to relate each day's discoveries and for her to absorb. Some fascinated. Others appalled. A book on eighteenth-century execution techniques included one on how to hang criminals from olive trees. It was the example which most stuck in her mind though others were as gruesome.
Rare was the occasion when Alfonso bored. By osmosis she ingested his librarian's wisdom and love of obscure literature. Alfonso was a gem. She would miss him when he left.
Yet she also longed for that day. Once the library was complete and catalogued, her architect and his builders could begin the transformation of antiquity into a comfortable house for herself. This would include the latest energy saving systems, which pleased her. She'd learned, from her cousin Inma's finca outside Yuste, how valuable and effective these could be.
When, when, when would she be able to reap the benefits of all this change? She wanted to focus on her olives. They mattered most of all to her future.
Nicosia (Cyprus)
Nikos guided his master to the chair which imposed itself on both room and visitors. The Archbishop possessed an insubstantial physique. To compensate he exploited his Kamilavka and Epanokamelavkion, the tall stiff black hat and neck veil, to the maximum.
Behind a large modern desk, his chair conveyed the image of a throne. What most would never see was the artificial dais behind the desk which raised the throne by a few centimetres yet did not prevent Nikolaos Constantinou from using the desk surface when he worked.
The only oddity, for what was otherwise a modern office-cum-study, was the lack of a personal computer. The technology visible comprised a couple of mobile phones and one elderly wired telephone handset with a dial. His Beatitude insisted this had been his mother's and he must continue to use it in her memory. Nikos had wasted many an hour retrofitting it to work with modern telephone systems. His master never realised; His Beatitude just assumed.
With his master ensconced, Nikos headed for the other side of the desk and sat in one of a pair of lower chairs placed so supplicants must beseech the Archbishop. Neither must block His Beatitude's view out over the Old Town.
"What do we have today, besides the usual daily meetings?"
Nikos consulted his tablet. Without this he could never keep up with his master's demands. In the monastery, life had been hard and simple. Reintroduced to the real world, Nikos had had to adapt to his master's new demands.
It was his personal good fortune that, as a teenager and before his family had decided he must become a monk, he'd experimented with gadgets which included computers. He'd taught himself and become proficient. Then his parents pressed him to become a monk, to ease the strain on their finances from feeding six children.
In the decade or more which had passed since his admission to the monastery, the electronic toys available had reduced in price and evolved. But not the fundamentals he'd worked out for himself in his teens. To his relief and pleasure, he wasn't out of his depth once authorised to find new methods to support his master. He'd discovered much beyond what he needed to satisfy the immediate day-to-day demands of the Archbishop.
This improbable blessing facilitated his readjustment to the real world. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two monks had deteriorated since his Abbot became Archbishop of Nova Justiniana and All Cyprus. Nikos resented the changes more and more, but never let his dismay show.
"Cut the daydreaming," snapped Nikolaos.
"My humble apologies, Your Beatitude. I was waiting for the information to arrive on this." Nikos brandished the tablet. He knew Nikolaos hadn't a clue, just as he knew Nikolaos was accurate with his accusation.
"This morning you have Father Georghios Papandreas..."
"You mean the simpleton from Paphos, the one the TV voted 'best parish priest of the year'? What's he want? Why do you trivialise my time with such naive idiots?"
"We had no choice, Your Beatitude."
"No?"
"No. Remember. Your predecessor introduced an edict by which any parish, when represented by their priest, can insist on an audience. That's what's come into play today."
"My – our – idiot predecessors left much which should be undone in their haste to attract popularity. We..."
Nikos took advantage of one of his few remaining privileges. He could interrupt his master, if he had good reason, without fear of condemnation.
"May
I remind Your Beatitude? This mechanism has positive dimensions, for example not only pricking the bubble of incipient local dissent but also providing the faithful with the opportunity to contribute."
The Archbishop relented. The thought of receiving monies always calmed him. "You're right, my Nikos. Our unworldliness forgets these audiences come with a parochial contribution."
Nikos squirmed. Nikolaos describing himself as unworldly was as ridiculous as a fox proclaiming itself a chicken. As Abbot, Nikolaos had been industrial in his quest for contributions to 'his' Monastery. It was a central part of the job, he'd always insisted to Nikos; heads of monasteries must fund raise.
"After Father Georghios, you have nothing beyond your regular meetings. Tomorrow morning, I hope to have your brother and possibly your niece. Later, if I can coordinate it, there will be Tassos Christodoulou. Or I could postpone him if you prefer?"
"No, no, no. You could postpone Father Georghios, forever. We must see Tassos. He may be the answer to our little financial problem."
Nikos looked up, his face painted blank. He resented Nikolaos's obsession with his building project. It was neither holy nor suitable. Yet he couldn't escape, not without resigning his position which would mean a premature return to that dank, cold monastery in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains. It was Nikolaos's elevation to the Archbishop which had rescued him. For sure there were no Vasilia's in that bleak hellhole.
"Shall I show in Father Georghios?"
Nikolaos Constantinou grimaced. He'd barely heard. Instead he preferred to admire the cranes standing tall above what had once been his Archiepiscopal Palace and was now a huge, waterlogged hole.
His reverie dissipated with Nikos's next announcement.
Resurrection (The Corruption Series Book 4) Page 3